HTC Legend - silver review: HTC Legend - silver

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The GoodThe HTC Legend boasts a beautiful design with an AMOLED touch screen. The Android 2.1 smartphone adds a faster processor, more RAM, and a camera flash. HTC Sense features new and useful enhancements.

The BadThe Legend isn't compatible with North American 3G bands. Camera quality is mixed.

The Bottom LineWith its design improvements and feature enhancements, the HTC Legend is a worthy upgrade from the Hero and one of the most solid and well-built Android phones we've seen in its class. We can only hope that a North American version is released soon.

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If you couldn't tell, we were a little smitten with the HTC Legend when we saw the Android smartphone debut at Mobile World Congress 2010, so you can imagine our delight when the device landed in our office just a few days ago. As the successor to the GSM HTC Hero, the Legend brings a slew of improvements, such as a faster processor, a newer version of HTC Sense that enhances Android 2.1, and an AMOLED touch screen. It's also one of the most well-designed smartphones we've seen to date. The Legend is not only a worthy successor to the Hero, but it's also one of the most solid Android smartphones in its class today. So what's the catch, you ask? You're so astute, dear reader. The catch is that the HTC Legend is currently available in Europe and Asia only, and thus does not support North American 3G bands. There also have been no official announcements about whether it will be picked up by a U.S. carrier. If you can live without the 3G (it does have Wi-Fi) and can afford the unlocked price ($535+), we think you won't be disappointed in the HTC Legend.

Design
There are plenty of great-looking smartphones out there, but it's rare that a device completely stops us in our tracks with its beauty. The HTC Legend did, and it's not so much because the Legend is sexy in the traditional sense, but rather, it's the finer details that made us pay attention.

Designed by One & Co., the San Francisco-based design firm that HTC acquired in December 2008, the Legend features an aluminum unibody construction, which creates a seamless design that extends all the way to the inner battery compartment (more on this in a bit) and offers a sleeker, more solid construction than its predecessor, the GSM HTC Hero. At 4.41 inches tall by 2.22 inches wide by 0.45 inch deep and 4.4 ounces, the Legend fits nicely in the hand and sits comfortably in a pants pocket. The Legend keeps the protruding "chin" at the bottom. We know it's a love-it-or-hate-it feature, but it's less prominent than before, and we didn't mind it at all.

The HTC Legend is one of the most well-designed smartphones we've seen to date.

On the backside of the chin, you'll find a small battery door at the bottom of the device that you can pop off by pushing down with your thumbs. What you find inside isn't your typical battery compartment; in fact, you might wonder how the heck you insert the battery in the first place. If you look closely, there's a latch that you can flip down on the right side and then slide in the battery as well as your SIM card and micro SD card. This demonstrates the careful thought and crafty engineering that went into designing the Legend, and we certainly appreciate it.

Love it or hate it, the chin's still there.

Flipping back to the front, you'll find the Legend's display, which measures 3.2 inches diagonally, just like the Hero's, and keeps the same HVGA (320x480 pixel) resolution. It doesn't quite have the sharpness and smoothness offered by WVGA touch-screen phones, but you do get a benefit of an AMOLED display rather than a standard LCD. Those benefits include brighter colors, wider viewing angles, and reduced power consumption. The Legend's capacitive touch screen also offers pinch-to-zoom gesture support, a built-in accelerometer, and a proximity sensor.

Below the display, you get four hardware buttons: Home, Menu, Back, and Search. However, instead of a trackball, HTC replaced it with an optical joystick in order to keep with the seamless design created by the unibody construction. The small circular control doesn't look like much and we were skeptical about how such a tiny thing could be used a navigation tool, but it worked well for scrolling through the various home screen panels and menus and can even be pressed in to select an item. We still used the touch screen for most interactions with the device, but it came in handy when trying to click on smaller Web links.

There's a volume rocker on the left side. On top of the device, you'll find the power button and 3.5mm headphone jack, and there's a Micro-USB port on the bottom.

User interface
The Legend runs on Android 2.1, which is enhanced by HTC Sense. Out of all our custom skins for Android (Motoblur, TouchWiz, etc.), Sense is our absolute favorite and is even more so with the new enhancements. Announced at Mobile World Congress 2010, the added features include a revamped mail widget that shows a list view of all your e-mail instead of just one message. Once in the mail app, there's a handy tabbed interface at the bottom that lets you view unread messages, attachments, meeting invites, and more with a simple touch. The Agenda widget also now displays your whole agenda on the screen, and like the HTC HD2, you get a weather widget right on the home screen that automatically displays the current conditions based on your location.

You also get a new Group Contacts widget, which lets you, well, organize your contacts by groups. For example, you can set up one for work colleagues, another for friends, and another for just family--whatever you please. The UI looks good, and it's simple to add contacts to a group, though removing them requires a few extra steps.